


the most ill-regulated memory

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers, Primeval
Genre: Annoying Colleagues, Bad Parenting, Childhood Memories, Families of Choice, Gen, Paggleham, Returning Home, Talboys, Tumblr Ask Box Fic, Wimsey books as family history
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-30
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:01:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22484554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: “If we can't get the locals to talk to us,” Sarah began.“But we've got a local, haven't we,” Danny said.Everyone stared at him.Danny looked pointedly at Becker, grinning. “Soldier boy didn't need the GPS to get here. Or a map.”“It's called a sense of direction,” Becker said. “They don't teach it at Sandhurst.”***Somewhat against his will, Hilary Becker goes home.
Relationships: Hilary Becker & Paul Wimsey, Hilary James Becker & Danny Quinn, Hilary James Becker & Jenny Lewis
Comments: 27
Kudos: 66





	the most ill-regulated memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PoppaeaSabina (AellaIrene)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AellaIrene/gifts).



> For poppaeasabina in my 12 fandoms of Christmas giveaway; she asked for Becker and Wimseys.

_I have **the most ill-regulated memory**. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves_ _undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether. – Gaudy Night_

“Great,” Jenny said, rubbing her temples. “So there's _no_ anomaly visible, but there _are_ creature tracks, and _nobody_ will talk to us, and it's past five-thirty in the countryside so everything is _shut_.”

There was a disconsolate silence from the anomaly team standing grouped around their cars, which were currently drawn up in a large lay-by just outside Pagford Parva (which claimed on the Ordnance Survey to be a separate village, but sprawled more or less into Great Pagford unless you were looking very closely for the boundary). Everyone knew Jenny was right, and nobody had anything to add.

“Maybe it was a dog,” Sarah suggested, resting her chin on her joined fists. “And then we can all go home.”

“Fat chance,” Abby said gloomily. “Dogs don't have dewclaws like _that_.”

“I'll pretend I know what you're talking about.” Jenny ran her hands through her hair. “Are you sure you can't follow the tracks? Any chance of picking them up?” 

“I lost them on the train tracks by Broxford,” Abby said irritably, possibly because she had been found squirming through a damaged chainlink fence and accused of trespassing and threatened with fines, jail time and all manner of dire menaces before Jenny had got involved. Danny had found it so funny he hadn't effectively intervened on her behalf, mostly because he couldn't stop laughing.

For the health and safety of all concerned, Danny had been banished to a different car.

Connor trailed over from the post office round the corner, looking a bit shell-shocked, and followed by Danny himself. “No luck,” he said, shaking his head. “She nearly slammed the door on my foot heaving me out. Closing five thirty sharp, she said, and if we were missing a strange dog why didn't we put a note on the board.”

There was a general sigh. It was a beautiful summer's afternoon in middle England, and the anomaly team had no idea what to do. 

“If we can't get the locals to talk to us,” Sarah began.

“But we've got a local, haven't we,” Danny said.

Everyone stared at him.

Danny looked pointedly at Becker, grinning. “Soldier boy didn't need the GPS to get here. Or a map.”

“It's called a sense of direction,” Becker said. “They don't teach it at Sandhurst.”

“Did they teach you which platform the London trains go from at Broxford Station?”

“No,” Becker said, scowling at Danny. He tapped his fingers irritably on the bonnet of the car he was leaning against. “I lived here when I was a kid, but I haven't been back for years.”

There was something about the way he said it that did not encourage recriminations, or complaints that he could have said something before. The team fell awkwardly silent.

Sarah cleared her throat gently. “Is there anyone you might still know... locally?” 

Becker scraped his teeth over his lower lip and thought for a while. “Maybe,” he said at last, as if the words were being forcibly pulled from his mouth. “But I don't know if he's in.” He straightened up and gestured at the cars. “All right, everyone get in, and follow me. GPS is no good round here.”

Becker stopped in the pub car park of a village that was not much different from either Great Pagford or Pagford Parva, except that it showed fewer signs of commuter developments, and was only about five minutes' drive away. The handsome church at one end of the village, the slightly smaller chapel at the other, the war memorial, the cricket ground, the pub, the classically English cottages of several historical periods, including a particularly nice Elizabethan farmhouse they passed on the way in... It would have felt like a village caught in time, were it not for the occasional plane overhead and the sign saying that Paggleham welcomed careful drivers.

“You know, this is exactly the sort of place I imagined Becker growing up,” Sarah said, to Jenny. 

Jenny watched Becker, who was parking the car with a kind of irritable finickiness, and returned only a non-committal noise in reply.

Becker told them all very firmly to stay in the pub or watch the cricket, and not to ask anyone any probing questions, about dogs or anything else. Then he left, walking around the corner at a brisk pace. Sarah drifted sideways long enough to see him disappear round another bend in the road, but knew better than to follow him.

She eyed the sign above the pub door instead. 

“Any idea why this place is called The Aspidistra?” she said.

Somebody had fixed the gate at Talboys in the last few years. When Becker had been a boy it had creaked and groaned so artistically that it seemed likely to collapse, and everyone had used the back gate instead. Lord Paul kept saying he was going to get it fixed, but never did; Becker had always thought he was just trying to annoy his brother Bredon, who expended so much time and effort on the management of the ducal properties in Norfolk that he was apt to find the slightest indication of bad husbandry on anyone else's part anxiety-inducing. 

Why the hell had Becker opened the front gate anyway? He wasn't a bloody city boy, and if he knew anything about the Paggleham area's gossip network Mrs Maggs had probably already spotted him outside the post office and had happened to mention it to someone who’d mentioned it to someone who’d rung Lord Paul. He'd be expected. Becker shut the gate behind him, and looped round the house to the back door, where he knocked instead of ringing the bell. A familiar elderly Labrador set up barking, and a less elderly man - in his sixties, with a long, clever face, decided nose, dark brown eyes, and still-thick hair that had once been fair and was now white - came to the door. The way he paused made Becker think that perhaps Mrs Maggs had fallen down on the job, but he opened the door anyway, and smiled at Becker.

“Hilary Becker, as I live and breathe,” said Lord Paul Wimsey genially. “Come in! - oh, _shut up_ , Blackadder - Hilary is a friend, you'll remember him in five minutes.”

Becker found there was a large lump in his throat. He coughed to try to clear it, and stepped over the threshold, being careful to wipe his boots thoroughly. “Thank you, sir. It's been a while.”

“Nearly seven years,” Lord Paul agreed. “And though I haven't got rid of your awful father yet, I have successfully got him off the parish council, so at least I very rarely have to listen to him any more.”

Becker smiled. They had moved to Great Pagford when Becker himself was only six. Becker had guessed long ago from the scorn in his father's words about the Wimsey family that he had hoped to get in well with the Duke of Denver, who was much Colonel Becker’s own age and often returned to Paggleham. The Duke had grown up there, after all, and his widowed mother still lived at Talboys. But Harriet, Dowager Duchess of Denver, had then reached an age where she did not suffer fools if she did not want to, and while she'd welcomed Rosemary and her little boy, she hadn’t given Hilary Becker senior so much as the time of day. Her sons had been guided by her judgement, and Colonel Becker never had got the invitations or the connections he’d hoped for.

It would not have been surprising to Becker, old enough and experienced enough to see the ways his father had bullied his mother, if they had left Great Pagford within the year. It hadn’t happened, though. Rosemary Becker had surprised her husband by refusing to give up the house when he was deployed elsewhere, and Becker had (at intervals) enjoyed a very carefree childhood, much of it spent at Talboys, where the Wimsey girls could babysit him and do their homework at the same time. Even after the girls had grown up and left for university, Lord and Lady Paul had continued to welcome him - odd jobs for pocket money, odd moments for help with Maths A-Levels, odd hours for nothing at all.

Becker remembered arriving one day when they had all been out - Harry Wimsey at university at St Andrews, Lucky Wimsey playing England Under-21 hockey in Ireland, Lady Paul visiting family in Jaipur, Lord Paul in London working on the stock market. Zoe Ruddle had let him in anyway, saying she was using the library here too, and Lord Paul had said to let him in to study any time.

“Any time?” Becker had said, shocked, and Zoe had said, “yeah sure, we've all _met_ your dad,” and then they had said nothing at all for the next several hours. When Becker had cycled home he'd found a key in the pocket of his Barbour that he hadn't put there. Somehow he'd never quite managed to return it. He probably still had it at home, somewhere.

Becker got the mugs down and reacquainted himself with Blackadder the Labrador while Lord Paul made the tea, talking in his urbane, easy way about his family: his daughters, his wife, his brother and nieces and nephews. Lucasta Wimsey apparently had twins, now, and a French husband, each not coinciding exactly with the other. Harriet had, after a false start involving a society engagement and a meddling wedding planner, got together with an old schoolfriend and was travelling around the world with her, blogging. Bredon had had a heart bypass and seemed all the better for it; Paul himself was properly retired now but keeping busy, keeping busy, with a little financial advice here and there, some lobbying the local MP, administering his mother's copyrights... and of course Hilary would want to know that Bristol had finally seen sense and offered Zoe Ruddle a _permanent_ lectureship.

Becker made suitable noises, and admired the photographs that Lady Paul had covered one wall in, plastering the brickwork to a soft cream and spacing the frames out well. There were more than there had been before, and more of them were in colour; the twins, the French husband, the current Duke of Denver and his grandchildren covering him in glitter. Becker had always liked the kitchen at Talboys, big and warm and cluttered and friendly, and the sense of history about it. The way his father had carried on, his parents had been descended from a line of statues with stiff upper lips and no human feelings. Since Becker had been discouraged from spending time with his maternal grandparents, and his paternal grandparents preferred young boys to be seen and not heard and gay men to happen somewhere else, he couldn't disprove his father's thesis. Here, though, were photographs of people who seemed real and meaningful, going right back to the Dowager Duchess of Denver who had been Lord Paul's grandmother, white-haired and mischievous and dripping with lace and a fancy hat. Lord Paul's mother shot his father a suspicious wifely look with a smile tucked into the corner of her mouth; the cousin who had left Denver to Bredon Wimsey, dressed in RAF uniform and full of life, tossed a young Bredon into the air and laughed. The middle Wimsey brother, the diplomat who'd been accidentally shot talking everyone else's way out of a hostage crisis, smiled next to an intelligent portrait of Lord Peter Wimsey cheerfully detecting his way through the 1920s. There were groups of people Becker knew nothing about, a stereotypical valet and something that looked like but couldn't possibly be a snake, and nobody was especially good-looking (except the RAF cousin) but they all seemed happy.

Becker was jealous.

“That's my brother Bredon's grass snake,” Lord Paul said informatively. Becker jumped. “He set it on a guest, but she deserved it, or at least my father always said so. I was too young to remember. Tea? Shalini has forbidden me from eating the sweets Harry sent for her birthday - don't marry a doctor, Hilary, they get so pointed about your cholesterol - but you look like you need feeding.”

Becker grinned. The Wimseys and any staff they employed had always been united in the belief that Becker needed feeding. “If you can spare one, sir.”

“Oh, I'm sure I can spare several.” 

They sat down at the kitchen table.

“So tell me all your news,” Lord Paul said genially. “Lucky tells me you've been involved in some rather interesting things lately.”

Lucasta Wimsey, Becker remembered slightly too late, was a journalist. Becker kept a straight face. “I don't know if you'd call it interesting, sir. We see some stuff.”

“You certainly didn't come all this way for nothing,” Lord Paul said. “And I'll hazard a guess that it wasn't to see your sainted parents, either... not dressed like that.”

No, if Becker ever went to Sunday dinner, he would not show up at half-past five on a Friday dressed in black fatigues. He wished he could have changed into something a bit more anonymous. 

“Some people have seen some stuff around here,” Becker said meaningfully. “We lost the trail around Broxford, but we thought it was heading this way. And it's not far over the fields.”

“You used to cycle it,” Lord Paul said blandly.

Trespassing all the way, Becker thought, but he didn’t get caught, did he? “You used to give Blackadder the run of the garden at this time of day.”

“Hmm,” Lord Paul said, brown eyes glittering, and then there was quiet while they finished their tea and Lord Paul bullied Becker into eating several gulab jamun – without much difficulty.

Becker put his cup down. “Are you going to tell me what you know, or shall I leave? We won't get anything out of anyone else, and without local help, we're never going to find whatever it is that's making you keep your dog in when he wants out.” (Blackadder had been let out twice, with much whining, in the course of the tea.) 

“I'll do you one better than that. Give me five minutes to put my boots on,” Lord Paul said. “I assume you've left your friends at the old Aspy?”

Becker nodded, trying to hide his smile. “Just one thing, sir... they don't know my name is Hilary.”

Or anything else about my background, he thought to himself. Though Quinn has probably guessed some of it, the bastard.

“Understood,” Lord Paul said, and gave his father's blandest troublemaking smile. “Lay on, Macduff.”


End file.
